The Sooty Empiric

I don't have time to blog much nowadays, but I want to keep this place active. One recurring use for the site is to outline things that I find myself having to repeat; better to just have a place I can link people back. So I am going to do that here with a common piece of careerist publication advice I give junior scholars in philosophy.  I often have graduate students ask me how publishing in such and such a journal will be perceived by others in the field. This is a somewhat complicated question for me as I am an  on-the-record sceptic about journals being good quality guides . So I always have to caveat a bit by at least telling people to go read my paper on this if they are interested. (Though of course I sometimes have to caveat a bit in the other direction - despite what I think of the current system, if someone under the present culture and incentive structure does not try to get their paper published through peer review that can be a negative quality sign...

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of the Humanities Report  that has been generating discussion . I really don't have the time or capacity to do much in depth thinking or reading about this so genuine apologies if I am missing something obvious or already covered in the report. I just want to have publicly stated something that I think of as the default or null hypothesis of sorts in this realm. Most academic work is bad. ( My own work included .) Most academics are left-wing. ( Myself included .) Nothing about being left-wing especially prevents you from doing bad work or elevates your work's average level of quality. So most of the bad work in academia is done by left-wing people with a left-wing slant. We could change that such that people would be more facially politically neutral or have a more right wing slant or have a variety of political slants in their work. That mig...

For a long time I resisted the label "analytic philosopher" for myself. I had done a fair bit of metaphilosophy reading on this and come to agree with Glock's perspective wherein analytic philosophy is a sort of vague cluster concept defined by sufficient similarity along metrics of prose-style, historical-influences, kinds-of-problems-you-care-about, how seriously you take certain common sense intuitions, and so on. If you are enough like the other analytics on enough of these metrics you count firmly in, and the more dissimilar you are to paradigm analytics on the more of those metrics you are you become increasingly less clearly analytic. So Timothy Williamson is very thoroughly an analytic, Wittgenstein is fairly analytic but a bit less centrally so, Reza Negarestani is probably not an analytic philosopher but isn't maximally distinct, and Hegel is definitely not an analytic philosopher. Why did I count myself out? Well I basically thought that on prose style I...

Briefly, towards the end of another  post  long ago, I indicated that I felt some affinity to humanism. And in conversation comrade philosophers have expressed some surprise at my self-identification as a humanist. A  going interest   for me is how we formal philosophers relate to other parts of the field, so in the spirit of using one's blog for self-indulgent musings that one can pretend have wider interest, I thought I would use this space to clarify how and why I feel it appropriate to describe myself as a humanist. (Not really going to dwell on it here, but folk interested in the relationship between formal philosophy -- especially logic -- and the humanities should also check out  this  essay by Greg Restall.) I am a humanist in the following vague sense. I have great faith in people's capacity to peacefully come together and do better than we've thus far done. Not only do I hope for a better world that we can all share in, but I think su...

What follows is not quite something I believe, nor even something I fear. It is something I fear I believe, my worst tendencies as a thinker and person. I share them in the hope it will be purgative, and also hoping that maybe others who are afflicted with similar thoughts might at least feel some camaraderie. Here is how society seems to me when I am at my worst. The very top echelons of our power hierarchy are occupied by extremely wealthy people, or those who have managed to secure high office in states large enough to seriously push back on capital. For the most part this latter means politicians and generals in the USA and China, though Putin and the odd EU bigwig might just about count here. These people are, when of sound mind, amoral sociopaths whose goals are utterly alien to the rest of us. Our global social order filters for callous disdain for human lives, hardening one's heart to the sufferings of the main part of humanity, and single minded focus on accr...

My friend and comrade Jonathan Birch has gifted me with another guest post. The first of his, which I also enjoyed, can be found here . I really appreciate his honest and frank look into the emotional and social stakes of his own work on animal rights. Without further ado over to Birch! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Liberalism and animal rights sit uneasily together. Liberalism calls for mutual toleration between different ways of life. Among the deepest, most entrenched parts of many ways of life are practices involving the farming, killing and eating of animals. In calling for robust animal rights to be written into law, animal advocates are calling for many of these practices to be banned. If a ban is to mean anything, it must be enforced. If robust animal rights were to be enforced, many would face criminal convictions for continuing to live as they do now. The tension is obvious and arises constantly, because many animal advo...